


New Horizons

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Animal Crossing Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23824681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “Good morning everyone. It is seven twenty-two here on Ahch-To and I have an exciting announcement! Ben is moving to the island this week, so we hope to give him the warmest of welcomes. He’s going to be opening up our own island museum, so any fossils, bugs, or fish you find, please bring ‘em on in so that we can begin to document how wonderful Ahch-To is as a place to live.”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 67
Kudos: 264
Collections: Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts)





	New Horizons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [walkingsaladshooter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingsaladshooter/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Новые горизонты](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26486536) by [janblues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janblues/pseuds/janblues)



> for the people who put blatherslo into existence but more specifically for rebecca whose birthday was on monday.

“Good morning everyone,” Rey says cheerfully into the microphone. She’s tired—she’d been up until nearly two in the morning the night before watching the stars over the sea, but that’s what coffee is for. The sun is rising, there are butterflies around, she’d passed  _ two _ sets of pink roses on her way to the Resident Services center, and she has this feeling down in her bones that today is going to be a good day. “It is seven twenty-two here on Ahch-To and I have an exciting announcement!” She looks down at the little note card that Luke had left for her. “Ben is moving to the island this week, so we hope to give him the warmest of welcomes. He’s going to be opening up our own island museum, so any fossils, bugs, or fish you find, please bring ‘em on in so that we can begin to document how wonderful Ahch-To is as a place to live.” That was it, but that was better than nothing. Most days, she feels as though she probably shouldn’t even make a town announcement, but Luke thinks that it’s good for continuity so she does anyway. She tries to find things to talk about. She’d been prepared to talk about the two sets of pink roses she’d seen.

She wonders who Ben is. He must know Luke somehow. Everyone knows Luke somehow, that’s how they end up on Ahch-To. Or at least—everyone who comes to town as more than just a resident. She wonders where he’ll stay. She hasn’t seen any signs of construction—not even for the museum that Luke said Ben was opening. But she’ll ask Luke about that when he gets in.

“Morning,” she smiles at him when he stomps into the Resident Services center. There’s mud on his boots, so she assumes he’d spent some of the morning fishing. “Who’s Ben?”

Luke doesn’t answer right away. He goes and takes his seat behind the construction counter and begins unlacing off his boots. “Ben’s my nephew,” he says slowly. “He’s been in a rough spot for the past few years, and his chickens are finally coming home to roost.”

“That’s wonderful!” Rey says delighted before pausing and realizing it had sounded like she was celebrating him being in a rough spot and not him coming to Ahch-To. But Luke’s smile tells her he understood her meaning and she presses on. “Han and Leia’s son?”

Luke nods. “We...we haven’t been close for a while. But it’s what family does for family.”

“Is he going to stay with them above the shop?” 

“That’s the plan for the time being. I don’t have all the resources I need just yet to get a fully functioning museum up, but hopefully that call to action will get residents doing their thing.” He looks up at Rey and the shadow on his face starts to soften. “You’ll make him feel welcome, right? He’s a bit gruff, and I don’t know that he’s had much kindness in a while. He hasn’t had much kindness from me,” he adds, sounding guiltier than Rey really knows what to do with. 

“Well, we’ll make him feel right at home,” Rey says.

“Maybe not the best thing for Ben,” Luke says. “Home wasn’t always happy for him.”

“Then we’ll make him feel…” and Rey pauses. She tries to think about what  _ she’d  _ want to feel on this island, what she does feel every day when she makes her announcements into that morning microphone. “Like he matters.”

Luke smiles, and Rey knows she says the right thing.

-

There aren’t a lot of flights in and out of Ahch-To, so when she hears the propellers of the sea plane overhead, Rey puts her  _ out to lunch _ sign on the Resident Services desk and hurries out the front door and along the new brick path towards the airport. The sun is shining, the breeze is making the trees sing around her and she sees a peacock butterfly as she goes. She pauses, digs out her net, and catches it.

_ Luke said he wanted bugs, so this can be a welcome gift. _

She sits in one of the vinyl chairs and waits only a few minutes before she hears footsteps on the wooden walkway outside.

Ben is taller than she’d expected, with shaggy dark hair. He’s wearing a brown suit like he’s going on a safari and a bow tie. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.

Rey gets to her feet. “Ben?”

“Yes,” he says slowly.

“I’m Rey, the Resident Services representative. Welcome to Ahch-To!” She gives him her brightest smile and he sort of blinks at her, disoriented. If he hasn’t slept well, though, that’s unsurprising. “Luke said you were setting up a museum?”

“That’s the plan,” Ben says. Behind him, Artoo and Threepio are unloading a huge set of suitcases. 

“I caught a butterfly on the way here,” she says and extends her net to show him. “I don’t know if it—”

But he recoils slightly away from her and she stops talking, confused. Luke had said bugs, hadn’t he?

“Sorry,” Ben says after a moment. “I just—I don’t like bugs. I’ll make sure it gets a safe home, though. Don’t worry.”

“Why are you putting bugs in your museum if you don’t like them?” Rey asks.

“I don’t get to decide what people learn based on what I don’t like,” he says, rolling his eyes as if continuing a long-standing argument Rey doesn’t know much about. He opens one of his bags and pulls out a plastic case with a ventilated top. He opens the hatch of it and extends it to Rey, who deposits the peacock butterfly into it. “Thanks,” he said. “I—” he swallows. “I appreciate the donation.”

“Of course!” Rey says, making a mental note to warn Ben about any bugs she might present to him in the future. “If you come this way—Luke said you were planning on staying with your parents?”

Ben swallows. “Yeah, that’s the agenda. At least until there are resources for the museum and everything.”

Rey nods. Luke’s team is so small it’s practically non-existent, but there are already two bridges and one ramp up the cliffs so she doesn’t have to climb everything to see the stars. 

She leads him along the new brick path. She shows him the trees they have, the flower patches—carefully not mentioning the bugs she knows he sees—and it’s not until they’ve reached Shop Solo that she stops talking. “Here we are.”

He looks at it, and swallows. Through the window, she can see that Han and Leia have paused in whatever it is they do when no one’s in the shop. They always do this, but usually one or both of them goes to stand by the door to welcome their patron. This time, though, they stare. 

“Thanks,” Ben says and he looks down at her. He looks so very tired. 

“Welcome to Ahch-To,” Rey says again. She waves to Han and Leia, then turns back towards Resident Services.

-

Dinner is a practically silent affair that night. Ben’s not surprised. He can practically feel his parents trying to read one another’s mind.

_ You ask him. No, you ask him. _

_ Don’t you dare say I told you so. _

Ultimately, he’s the one who talks, because nothing’ll sting worse than Uncle Luke’s pity. “Yeah,” he said. “You were right. There wasn’t any care there.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” his mother says and she reaches a hand across the table to find his arm. “I wanted to be wrong. You know I wanted to be wrong. But you’ll be so much happier building your own thing from scratch, won’t you? Maybe it’s not what Luke wanted, or what your father or I wanted, but at least it’s not what Snoke—”

“Yeah,” he cuts her off. He doesn’t want to think about what Snoke wanted. He doesn’t want to think about what  _ what Snoke wanted  _ means. It had been too much for him in the end. The museum industry was a darker and dirtier one than ever he’d thought it would be when he’d left for the mainland.  _ You’ll go far, my boy,  _ Snoke had told him, patting his cheek in what Ben had assumed was a prime example of a generational divide, where the older man didn’t realize that you shouldn’t do this anymore.  _ And we’ll have everything they think should be theirs. _

He’d just wanted to identify fossils, and put together pieces of the great puzzle of history. 

“There are fossils on the island,” his dad says at last. “I never know what they are when the residents bring ‘em in to sell, but if they take them to you first, I’m sure you’ll get to have your cake and eat it too.”

“Assuming they want to donate the fossils and not just sell them to you for money right out of the gate,” Ben grumbles.

“Oh, I wouldn’t count on that,” his mother tells him with a soft smile. “People here are kind. And perhaps they have high aspirations, but they also look after one another.”

Looking after one another. 

Ben’s never known what that means.

“I hope you’re right,” he says at last. 

And he catches it for just a moment—that look of hope in his mother’s eyes.

-

They keep bringing him bugs. She can’t tell if she wants to warn them that they shouldn’t, he hates bugs, or if she should let it be. If he didn’t want bugs in his museum, then he would have surely told his uncle not to advertise that he wanted bugs in his museum. All the same, she remembers the way he recoiled when she’d tried to give him a butterfly.

She resolves to stick to fish and fossils from there on out.

Not that she has a lot of time. Luke’s planning an over-the-top Nature Day event and it feels like her every waking hour is spent trimming hedges and watering flowers. Not that she can really complain. She likes being out in the sunshine. And sure, maybe Ben Solo doesn’t like bugs but Rey is delighted every time she sees an orchid mantis, or a ladybug settles on her clothes. 

She likes Ahch-To. She likes it a lot. It’s so green and beautiful—so much better than where she’d come from. Her plants don’t die no matter how much she waters them, and the sand only stretches along the beach. There’s water everywhere, and in late afternoons, she’ll sometimes sit by the river and just sing to herself, her feet dropping down into the cool water. Sometimes a fish will even nibble at her toes. But most importantly she can see the stars spangling the heavens above without a hint of light pollution, just like she’d always wanted to when she was a girl.

She tries not to think about how hard life has been, how brutal and lonely Jakku was. Instead she tries to think about where she is now, the Tico sisters who run the clothes store; Finn the fisherman and Poe the bug artist; Babu Frik who swings by every few days with rugs and wallpaper to sell and Jannah who shows up on Sundays to sell turnips; the grumpy Lanai couple who live by the southeastern shore of the island; and of course—Luke, Han, and Leia who keep everything running. With her help. 

She almost feels like part of the family sometimes. She doesn’t know for sure, though. She’s never had a family before, so how could she compare? She knows she’s not like Ben or anything, but they have her over for dinner, they care when she has questions or concerns. Hell, Luke had even started doing jumping jacks and yoga with her during breaks in their days behind the desks of the Resident Services building. 

“I’ve got a fish for you,” she says when she goes to the little tent that Luke had set up for Ben to store his prospective exhibits in. He looks up. He’s sitting behind a table, looking at blueprints she recognizes as having come from behind Luke’s construction counter. “Oh! Is that for the museum?”

“Yeah,” he says looking down at them. “He wanted to make sure that it met my needs before starting to build.” He gives Rey—not quite a smile. More like an attempted jerk at the lips. “What you got for me?”

She hands him the container proudly. She’s not the best fisher, but this one she’d found the night before. “Snapping turtle,” he says at once and there’s a light in his eyes she hasn’t seen before. It’s like his whole face is shining. “He didn’t get you, did he?”

“No,” Rey says.

“Good. That bite can be nasty.” He places the plastic container in the corner of the tent carefully. Almost lovingly. “Thanks. I’ve got way too many donations. I wasn’t expecting people to be this excited for a museum. On the mainland you practically have to pay people to come to one.”

“Can I look at the plans?” Rey asks and he stares at her for a moment as though he can’t quite believe she asked—as though he can’t quite believe she cares. 

“Yeah.”

He shows her his plans for a butterfly room, for the exhibit that will feel like you’re walking through a riverside path in the woods, but his face is positively transformed when he mentions,“Dinosaurs.” He’s actually grinning. It’s incredible to see, just how suddenly alive he seems, throwing into sharp contrast how dead and exhausted he’d looked before when she’d first met him. “Bones and fossils as far as the eye can see. People are going to be able to walk through the stages of evolution, right here on Ahch-To.” 

“I can’t wait,” Rey grins up at him and he grins right back. “It’s going to be amazing. Thank you for bringing it here for us.”

And he swallows as he looks down at her, his eyes flitting across her face curiously.

“Thanks for being excited about it,” he says at last. “I’m used to…”

“People not caring?”

“People only caring about prestige and money,” he says acidly. “How much money can they make off of people for their special exhibits. No one’s going to be charged for any entrance to my museum. No one.”

-

Museum construction begins on a rainy day and Ben knows he should just leave it be, should just stick to himself, but he goes to the museum site anyway. Luke’s down there, organizing materials and preparing his crew. 

“Go away,” Luke tells him, not unkindly. It’s weird—hearing his uncle speak to him not unkindly.

“I just wanted to see it,” Ben says.

“I got it,” Luke says firmly. “Just sit tight, ok? Before you know it, you’ll have all you ever wanted. It’s the least I can do.” Ben swallows and once again, that feeling of a tightening throat overcomes him. 

So he leaves his uncle to it and tries to convince himself to go for a walk around the island. He goes on walks every day. He tries to stick to the beaches—fewer bugs, but today, his feet take him up to the cliffs. The stone is slippery, but the higher up he climbs, the fresher the air seems to be and oh—oh, from up here, he can see everything. The whole island, stretched before him.

He can see Finn by the river, fishing away, trying to catch his next big kahuna or small fry to share on his Fishstagram, he sees his dad unloading wares from the sea plane at the airport, he sees Rey—Rey in a red vinyl raincoat bending over to smell a flower on her way back to Resident Services.

He swallows.

She’s been so nice to him.

_ You’re just starved of human care and compassion,  _ he thinks bitterly. But still, she’d brought him fish because he likes them better than bugs and she—literally—stops to smell the roses. 

And he likes her smile.

He wants her to smile at him all the time.

He wants to give her something that’ll make her smile, that’ll let her know that—even if he’d been gruff and awkward and reeling from the mainland when he’d arrived, her welcome had made all the difference in the world. Which is how he ends up gathering windflowers from the hills and weaving them into a crown for her. Or a wreath. He’s a man of some talents, but flowers aren’t one of them. He has half a mind to throw the thing away, except he knows, somehow, that just having the flowers in her hand, just having someone who made her something will mean everything in the world to her. And that’s what he wants for her.

So he marches into Resident Services, soaking wet and drops the crown or wreath onto the desk and waits for Rey to finish typing what she’s typing on her computer.

“Sorry,” she tells him, sounding panicked. “I need to finish this email. We’re trying to get Ahsoka Tano to come do a concert here.”

“Take your time,” Ben says, looking down at the flowers. They look like they’re wilting before his eyes. “No real rush.”

She finishes the email, sends it, and turns towards him and at once, her eyes land on the now very limp flower crown. “Oh!” she says delighted. “Did you make that?”

“I did. The rain did a number on it.”

“It’s lovely! There are so many lovely flowers here.”

“It’s for you,” he blurts out and Rey’s face goes very still. 

“For me?” she asks, her voice little more than a whisper. 

“For you,” he repeats. “If you want it. They’re a bit…”

But she’s already up from her seat and hurrying towards the desk, putting the flower crown on her head and smiling up at him with eyes as bright as stars. “Thank you,” she says and he hears a constriction he recognizes all too well in her throat. “Thank you. No one’s ever made something like this for me.”

“Thank  _ you _ ,” he tells her. “For making this…”  _ Not as bad as I was afraid it was going to be,  _ “a great place to live.”

She actually looks like she might start crying which is why he clears his throat and waves and heads back out into the rain. He’ll let her feel her feelings in peace. It’s the least he can do.

-

It keeps raining for two more days, and Rey wears the windflower crown for as long as it lasts. It smells so lovely and Ben made it for her. He had actually made it for her with his own two hands. Because she’d made this place meaningful for him. And somehow, that made it even more meaningful for her.  _ I want this to be the best home for everyone,  _ she had told Luke on her application to the job.  _ I never had a good home growing up and I don’t want anyone to feel that way ever.  _

She’d never thought that this would end up coming out of that, though. 

She wasn’t a fool—she could pick up on bits and piece of anxiousness. Luke’s, Leia’s, Han’s, and Ben’s. She knew there was a history there, even if she didn’t know what that history was. And somehow, she was sure, the history didn’t really matter anymore. Luke was building Ben a museum, Han had mentioned in passing that he’d be able to actually help the island sell its fossils now that Ben was going to be able to help identify them, and Ben—

Ben had a home, that he liked. Because she’d helped him like it.

When she’d been a girl, she’d wished on every star in the sky that she’d be happy one day and on Ahch-To, she actually thinks she is. There are stars here, too, twinkling down at her. And sometimes, even, there are meteor showers, with stars shooting down overhead. She has found little star pieces on the beach shores when she wishes hard enough, and in her spare time she thinks about turning them into the spaceships she’d always dreamed about as a child—ones that would take her away, take her off on an adventure, take her to a real home.

But she has a real home, now. And she doesn’t want to leave it. Not ever.

Not for all the stars in the sky. But luckily, she doesn’t have to.

She gets a home  _ and _ all the stars in the sky here on Ahch-To.

It’s the best place in all the world.

-

The call comes through to his phone while he’s sitting on the cliffs again. He likes it up here. It feels like it clears his head. 

“Hey kid. We’re done.”

And it’s all he can do not to sprint all the way down to the construction site. He’s never been much for running. He’s sort of gangly and not really built for speed. But before he can blink, he’s standing inside his very own museum. 

He can barely breathe. Luke outdid himself. The ceilings are high and vaulted, the water self-filters and self-regulates, there are little automatic spritzers for the plants. And the spaces for his fossils, for his dinosaur bones—

They’re exactly what he wanted. Luke hadn’t adjusted Ben’s designs at all. He’d let Ben know best for once.

“Thanks,” he whispers to his uncle as their footsteps echo through the hallway.

“To new horizons,” Luke tells him and Ben actually believes he means it.

-

Ben takes Rey through the museum. He shows her the butterfly garden because he knows that even if he dislikes bugs, she likes them and her eyes fill with wonder at all the jeweled wings fluttering around her. He shows her the deep-sea tanks—devoid of any fish, but Finn is already determined to catch him a marlin before the end of the month, so he thinks it might actually happen. He shows her where he hopes to expand into an art wing because—even if he never wants to touch the black art market again, that doesn’t mean the people of Ahch-To shouldn’t have art in their museum. Especially when they’ve been so kind to him. 

Rey  _ oohs _ and  _ ahhs _ exactly where she’s supposed to, and she even stops to read the signage that he’d prepared for the empty fossil slots. “That way I know what I’ll be looking at when they’re full.”

He likes that she wants to come back. 

“You really believe it?” 

“Believe what?”

_ In me? _

“That it’ll really be full of fossils one day?” So far, only one of the Lanai had found a fossil and brought it to him, and she’d donated it straight away. He hopes there'll be more.

“Of course I do,” she tells him. “I believe in this place and I believe in all of us.”

And somehow he hears himself included in that  _ us _ . It’s enough.

-

Rey takes him up to the cliffs that night. According to the radio, there’s supposed to be a meteor shower, and she wants to show him what it looks like when the sky lights up. 

“I love the stars,” she says. “They’re so beautiful.”

“They’re good here,” he observes. “No light pollution.”

“No,” Rey agrees. She wants to tell him everything. She wants to tell him about how she likes how soft the air is, how bright the flowers. But instead she just runs her fingers through the grass as she looks out over the water towards the stars. 

“Make a wish,” he tells her when they see one falling and she closes her eyes and wishes…

Once, she might not have thought that her wish would come true. But then she feels his fingers brush against hers in the grass and she opens her eyes and turns to look at him and—

And he’s watching her, his gaze intense, and she doesn’t know what to say because she wants to say so much. 

She gets the feeling it’s the same for him.

She hears a tinkling overhead, knows another star is falling, and this time, she doesn’t close her eyes when she wishes. This time, she laces her pinky finger through his and holds her breath.

His pointer finger finds hers and they both look up at the stars again and Rey feels the corners of her lips lift in a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> [here i am!](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter) thank you to lilibeth for the lovely lovely art which you can find [here](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter/status/1253748515253161992) and [here](https://shmisolo.tumblr.com/post/616302985095544832/good-morning-everyone-it-is-seven-twenty-two).


End file.
